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Comment by masto | Hacker News Reader

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Me too, though it was more like 25 years. If someone asked me "who is your hero", I would answer John Walker. To be honest, I didn't know all that much about him beyond The Hacker's Diet, his own autobiography/Autodesk File, and the stuff on his web site circa 15-20 years ago. But the things I did know seemed admirable:

* He was an engineer's engineer, and when his company became successful, the impression I got was that he stayed one.

* The Hacker's Diet is a good example - approaching weight loss as a problem to be solved the same as any other: by learning what's known about it and using empiricism and data.

* As far as I can tell, at some point he decided he had achieved all the money he needed so he went off to Switzerland and became a sort of mad scientist, pursuing whatever interested him for the rest of his life. Including things like the hotbits random number generator, where he installed a radiation source in his basement and used it to serve random bits up via a public web API.

None of us are perfect, and it's best not to know too much about one's heroes, so I didn't. I looked up to the John Walker in my mind as the person I want to be when I grow up, and this sad news hits hard.

It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt weight regain. Being persistently hungry all the time just sucks.

Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this

There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?

There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.

Didn't want to delve into it in the original comment but what you mention is correct and is one of the reasons I mentioned how far back this was.

I haven't read Herman Pontzer's recent research, I'd equate to becoming a more efficient runner; as efficiency increases energy demands are reduced.

Some of today's research just didn't exist when this was written. Of course, some of the advice was already debatable by the time I got to read it in the mid-late 00's, but that can be said for a lot of health and fitness advice even today.

I didn't follow it proscriptively. What it did do was give me a different approach to tackling it as a problem and was the first resource I had read that helped in that regard. Everything else was very much eat less of this and more of that

Like thread's asking which book/resource to use when learning to code, there are many good examples out there. Not all are perfect, and some are occasionally wrong but like that example, this was the one that stuck with me.

Something most people miss, as it is only briefly mentioned, is he was eating on big meal each day after work. That's basically like 20/2 intermittent fasting. It definitely would have had an effect on his metabolism and insulin resistance. It's not a dictum, he just gives an anecdote and mentions it.

I was reviewing HD a few years ago to see if it still held up against current, prevailing wisdom and noticed this. Kind of blew my mind.

There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.

You could achieve a constant NEAT by having a daily step goal or some prescribed amount of activities outside your exercise routine. I am supposed to do 2 hours of exercise per day plus give or take 10K steps. This can easily make me extremely active by American standard.

Now, surely your BMR will compensate, but probably only to a certain point.

In the end, it's probably easier to just eat healthy and eat less rather than trying to increase your caloric expenditure, but that's also rather hard to do for a variety of reasons.

Also, regular exercise will have more benefits than just increasing your caloric expenditure. It keeps your muscle mass from deterioriating as you age.

“Supposed to”? Is this a lifestyle/athletic goal, or a medical recommendation (or something else)?

There’s a time and a place, man. Well actuallying on an obituary isn’t it.

> CICO is hard to maintain. Eventually willpower fails and gradual overeating begins, leading to surprisingly large and abrupt weight regain.

The key difference, for nerd hackers, is the floater/sinker graph and the average. Some apps do this these days, though it seems to be less common than it was a few years ago (e.g. Withings and Apple no longer present their data that way).

So as long as the sinker is below the trend you will lose, at some rate. You don’t have to be starving yourself unless you have a fetish, just stay below the trend line. When you have a spurt of enthusiasm you can drive yourself lower; when you are finding it hard, just try to stay below trend.

It’s a manual form of gamification.

> So if you do a 400-calorie run

That's not enough, the energy will be provided by glycogen stored in muscles and fat stored in the liver and those will be restored quickly. What happens if you do a 3000 calorie bike tour is the interesting question.

Exercising raises metabolism at least during during the exercise (anything different would be a physical nonsense) - the issue is not exercising enough.

>It's basic CICO, from having skimmed it. The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing.

I couldn't disagree more. THD is not really a diet, it just explains the baseline facts of weight loss and enables you to choose whatever diet that works for you. It takes the mystery out of it. You may gain weight one week and lose weight the next, but you will know why.

The hackers diet makes a very convincing argument that any diet that works is in fact "CICO in disguise". The key point being that "Calories in" is not whatever is printed on the box, it is instead /what your body has absorbed from it/.

So for example when you eat 3000 calories of salmon in bearnaise sauce as part of your Atkins or whatever and you lose weight, clearly your body is not absorbing 3000 calories (for whatever reason). If you follow the hacks in THD you will discover this, and any other effect various foods have on /you/. It will also help you discover if a 400-calorie run actually works for you or not.

I am very thankful to Mr Walker for writing THD. He gave me the tools to "fix myself" when I notice that I have put on a few, and I have used those tools successfully many times.

> The problem is this type of diet has the greatest likelihood of failing. CICO is hard to maintain.

CICO is hard for people who are fat or who will become fat. It is not true it is hard. It is poor impulse control, not lack of willpower.

> There is scant to zero literature to suggest exercising raises metabolism. Recent research by Herman Pontzer shows the opposite, that calories burned with exercise are negated later through lowered BMR and NEAT. So if you do a 400-calorie run and then eat a 400 calorie cookie, you will still get a net 400 gain, or close to it.

Nonsense, this is a lie to make obese people not exercise. Anyone who has exercised knows this is fake news. By perpetrating fake "science" you are also a source of demotivating people to improve. It is disgusting to post this. Look at a runner, your fake "science" busted. The Hadza are as genetically removed from other humans as possible (including their distance from other African peoples).

>>Some of the stuff is possibly wrong, like this

>There's a lot of nonsense floating around regarding exercise and weight control. The only way to lose weight is to eat less than your body burns. Period. Exercising causes your body to burn more, but few people have the time or inclination to exercise enough to make a big difference. An hour of jogging is worth about one Cheese Whopper. Now, are you going to really spend an hour on the road every day just to burn off that extra burger?

He is wrong and very wrong at that, while stating something that is factually correct. This is like telling a man that he is poor because he earns too little and spends too much - "see it's simple arithmetic" is the stand take by someone who does not know all the variable.

Most geeky types personalities are like that - they completely fail to realize or appreciate the enormous complexities of biological systems and think that they can model a biological system in their spreadsheets or formulas.

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